Farnsworth House saved

A last-minute surge of donations gave preservation groups the war chest to buy an Illinois landmark house for more than $7.5 million Friday at a tension-filled auction in Manhattan.

Leaders of the non-profit organizations that won the bidding for the Farnsworth House, located 58 miles southwest of Chicago, said their success meant that the house, considered a masterpiece of modernism and one of the most important residential designs of the 20th Century, would not be moved out of the state, as some had feared if a wealthy bidder had come out on top.

The preservation groups say they will put a legal restriction on the house, designed by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, to make sure it stays where it is, on the banks of the Fox River near Plano in Kendall County. The new owners plan to turn the Farnsworth House, which was completed in 1951, into a museum open to the public.

"We're ecstatic, and we're thrilled for Chicago," said Joe Antunovich, chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois, one of three groups involved in putting together the winning bid.

Although there were reportedly as many as four prospective buyers who had deposited $250,000 for the right to bid on the Farnsworth House, the eight-minute auction at Sotheby's East Side headquarters was a contest between the preservation groups and one other bidder, who Sotheby's officials said requested anonymity.

Handling the bidding for the three groups was Chicago art dealer Richard Gray, who played the same role for Chicago's Field Museum in 1997 when it bought the fossilized remains of the Tyrannosaurus rex named Sue for $8.4 million at a Sotheby's auction.

When Friday's bidding was hammered to a close, the leaders of the preservation groups cheered and hugged, a rare display of emotion in the normally restrained world of high-level auction houses.

The Farnsworth House, designed as a weekend residence for Chicago physician Edith Farnsworth, is regarded as one of the purest expressions of Mies' austere International Style, a house stripped down to its bare essentials. The single-story, single-room structure, a simple rectangular frame of steel and glass, rests on the thinnest of supports, seeming to float above the ground.

"It defined the urban landscape in the second half of the 20th Century," said former Sara Lee Corp. Chairman John Bryan, head of Friends of the Farnsworth House, which was instrumental in raising money for the auction.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington, the third group involved in Friday's winning bid, will hold the title to the house. The landmarks council is to operate it as a museum.

Architects and Mies experts who dreaded the prospect that the precisely scaled building might be moved to a less suitable site were jubilant.

"Oh, thank heavens," said Phyllis Lambert, president of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal who, as a young woman, persuaded her father, Samuel Bronfman, to commission Mies to design the Seagram building on Park Avenue here.

Mies' grandson, Chicago architect Dirk Lohan, who painstakingly restored the house after it was damaged by floodwaters from the Fox River in 1996, said operating the small house as a museum will be a challenge but added, "I am very thrilled that it is in good hands."

The current owner, British real estate developer Peter Palumbo, decided to put the Farnsworth House on the auction block after Illinois pulled out of a $7 million deal to buy it, citing the state's fiscal woes.

Palumbo, who bought the house from Farnsworth in 1972 for $120,000, said that he was "delighted" the National Trust "has acquired this national treasure."

As concerns grew in recent weeks that a private buyer would alter or move the house, the trust and the landmarks council each pledged $1 million toward purchasing the property, and other benefactors pledged about $1.5 million, for a total of about $3.5 million.

That is where the preservation groups stood early Friday. Sotheby's estimated that the Farnsworth House would command at least $4.5 million.

National Trust President Richard Moe credited media stories about the impending auction, especially a radio report that aired Friday morning on the NPR program "Morning Edition," with prompting more donors to come forward.

Bryan said four individuals, whom he declined to name, pledged funds Friday as a team of Chicago-area preservationists headed to New York for the auction.

The Farnsworth House was the last item in an afternoon art auction. As the sale approached, the auction floor filled with spectators and a hush fell over the room.

From an opening bid of $3.5 million, the price rose slowly in increments of $50,000 or $100,000.

Gray, following the same practice as he did at the Sue auction, bid over the telephone from a private room overlooking the auction floor.

The preservationists' winning bid was $6.7 million, but with Sotheby's commission, the final price was $7,511,500.

Gray said that before the auction started, Bryan gave him a price that he could not exceed. But as the auction continued, Bryan upped the number, apparently having held some funds in reserve.

Even that was not enough.

Finally, Gray added a personal donation to win the bidding.

"It's a singular work of architecture," said Gray, who declined to reveal how much he contributed. "It's a one-of. There's nothing like it."